Letters: Sir Bernard Crick

Peter Dorr writes ... With Derek Heater and Alex Porter, Bernard Crick (obituary, 20 December) founded the Politics Association in 1969 to support the teaching of the subject in the secondary and tertiary sectors - a further example of his desire to associate politics with positive attributes.

Geoffrey Prout writes ... Bernard Crick was a key figure in the Hansard Society's pathfinding programme for political education. While it fell upon stony ground in the early Thatcher years, Kenneth Baker, as education secretary, showed greater interest when he introduced citizenship as a theme of the national curriculum in 1988.

Derek Hender writes ... In the mid-1970s, Bernard Crick was appointed chief examiner, then university moderator, for the University of London's then examination in British constitution at both ordinary and advanced levels. He devised, with astonishing zeal, a new syllabus in government and politics at A-level, with optional papers on comparative government and modern political ideas and doctrines. Entries soon soared beyond all expectations.

David Kerr writes ... Bernard Crick was fiercely determined to ensure that citizenship should remain a "public political", but not party political, issue, and that schools should have flexibility in how they approach it. Both have been proved sound calls.

Jean Seaton writes ... Bernard Crick was in many ways a magnificently impossible person - clever, at times overbearing, absurd, self-centred, and yet at times humane, and certainly very human. He was no collaborator, but communities formed in his slipstream.

At Birkbeck College he appointed people with quite different interests who emerged as public intellectuals - including Paul Hirst and Ben Pimlott. Its students spent their days running the House of Commons - or indeed sitting in it - working in thinktanks, being journalists or doctors, running charities and the civil service, and their nights studying at No 10 Gower Street.

Summer parties would spill out into the Bloomsbury garden. Bernard always let off fireworks, but much to his chagrin only once managed to get a direct hit on Senate House. Birkbeck did much to help the Labour movement rethink itself in sensible mode when the Labour party teetered on the brink of extinction during the early 1980s.

The Orwell prize, established with help from David Astor and his son Richard, is now the pre-eminent award for political writing. Crick tried to change the world as well as comment on it.